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Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

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Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#451

Post by godDLL »

Joeri wrote: post #367
foobarbaz33 wrote: post #119

> if I'm missing on any new developments since 2015 Yes, you missed something huge. Apple Silicon M1 or nothing. It's just too good. Low power consumption allows the laptop to actually be used as a laptop. The power use-to-performance ratio is unmatched by anything on the market. Apple is breaking us free from decades of stagnation on the hardware front. Nothing else on the market comes close. I expect this to change…

I was going to replace my thinkpad with a new thinkpad, but when apple released the M1 macbook air I had to change my mind. I paid the same that I would have paid for a T series, but got something that has the sleek thin and light build quality on par with an X1 with performance of a P series and battery life that hasn't existed on thinkpads ever since they dropped power bridge. Oh, and it is fanless. If my macbook a…

Not so, and here's why:

Apple is chasing a target, and so does Lenovo. But Lenovo is chasing the way a MacBook used to be, which is good in my opinion.

And Apple is skating wherever THE PUCK ARE THEY SKATING NOW SRSLY

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#452

Post by masklinn »

ajvs wrote: post #333
masklinn wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's hope AMD mobile processors will work better, and that we'll be able to find decent laptops using them. It doesn't have anything to do with the processor does it? Surely neither intel nor amd have removed S3 support? AFAIK it's integrators (motivated by Microsoft's push of "modern standby"?) which make it unavailable in their bioses: S3 needs bios integration, modern standby is just S0. Or do you mean "hopeful…

Intel 11th gen CPUs are 100% Modern Standby and DO NOT have S3 sleep. I don't know about AMDs support.

Wow, TIL I'm never getting an intel CPU again. Not that I was planning to, mind.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#453

Post by godDLL »

smoldesu wrote: post #432
foobarbaz33 wrote: post #119

> if I'm missing on any new developments since 2015 Yes, you missed something huge. Apple Silicon M1 or nothing. It's just too good. Low power consumption allows the laptop to actually be used as a laptop. The power use-to-performance ratio is unmatched by anything on the market. Apple is breaking us free from decades of stagnation on the hardware front. Nothing else on the market comes close. I expect this to change…

Lol

No, he's correct on the side of speed. But that only ticks one of seven.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#454

Post by masklinn »

vbernat wrote: post #343
ajvs wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel 11th gen CPUs are 100% Modern Standby and DO NOT have S3 sleep. I don't know about AMDs support.

Lenovo still puts it back on some of the laptops, like the X1 Carbon 9th Gen. So, I suppose this is not strictly dependent on the CPU.

After looking for confirmation of this, S3 support seems to be either missing or broken in various ways, there'a a reddit thread where a System76 engineer talks about the mess that was: https://old.reddit.com/r/System76/comments/k7xrtz/ill_have_w...

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#455

Post by mdp2021 »

eertami wrote: post #436
microtonal wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TDP of the M1 is between 15 and 20 Watts That's the TDP. For light daily tasks (casual web browsing, e-mail, etc.) the M1 primarily relies on the energy-efficient Icestorm cores. While typing this comment and having some applications in the background (like Slack), package power use hovers between 40 and 300mW (roughly 100mW on average). The energy efficiency of M1 MacBook is remarkable. My wife had an M1 before…

>I wouldn't believe her when she told me she still had 80% battery remaining. Really? I feel like that's just having any 2021 laptop. I have a 13" Linux laptop with the i7-1185g. I'm not going to pretend it matches the performance/watt of an M1, but a few hours of video calling makes a completely negligible difference to battery life for me. 20% for a few hours of video calls just feels baseline. I've never been in a…

We should also compare the batteries to talk about "hours". This one is around 40Wh, according to `upower -d`; when it was new, I could do light work for 12..14h (Linux "desktop").

I have been trying getting some numbers from `powerstat`, intrigued by danieldk's results of 0.1W consumption: I am getting 3.7W during this browsing session. That 0.1W must be related to the CPU only. The result from `powerstat` is aggregate (if I raise the display lightness to an uncomfortable level the consumption raises to 4.5W). I do not know how to only get the consumption of the CPU. Trying to check...

Edit: I am really not sure how to disaggregate consumption and find a number comparable to that 0.1W. Maybe, danieldk, you could provide instead the aggregate consumption - the total (not just CPU) average consumption of your system? And eertami? Just to get an idea.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#456

Post by lpcvoid »

chx wrote: post #176
gadiyar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So which laptops do a good job of reliably supporting S3 standby/suspend? Any idea if the Framework laptop does?

You can check which ThinkPad BIOS has the option at their BIOS emulation site: https://download.lenovo.com/bsco/index.html For mine it's under Config // Power // Sleep State. Windows 10 means useless Modern Standby, Linux means S3. https://i.imgur.com/Y5CchL9.png In this covid helped me because I learned about this before I cooked my expensive new laptop in its bag :(

Wow, that is an incredibly cool thing for an OEM to offer. Never seen this for any other vendor before.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#457

Post by derefr »

grandpoobah wrote: post #46
hiisukun wrote: post #27

1. S3 Standby/suspend support. If your laptop supports that, you can close the lid and it will power ~everything except the RAM down (sometimes a USB port still charges). In 'new' laptops, including almost everything Tiger lake and Intel, S3 is being phased out for Microsoft's "Modern Standby", known as S0ix (or sometimes InstantGo). This is much more like a mobile phone, where it stays on but attempts to use as litt…

Was going to post the same thing (albeit far more poorly explained). Isn't Microsoft embarrassed about this? This has been an issue for my last two laptops over the last 5 years. How is it acceptable for this problem to still exist? My Lenovo supports S3 sleep, but I didn't discover it until probably a year into having bought it, so at that point my battery's ability to hold charge had already been sufficiently degra…

> Isn’t Microsoft embarrassed about this?

Do Microsoft Surface devices have this problem (the heat/fans spinning/high battery drain while sleeping, I mean)? If not, then Microsoft has no need to be embarrassed; it’s the rest of the PC laptop industry that should be embarrassed for not shipping hardware that does the right thing when the OS asks it to.

(Though, I mean, the rest of the PC industry should already be embarrassed, for still shipping new PCs in 2021 that don’t have Thunderbolt/USB4 ports, and desktop PCs that don’t even have a single USB-C port.)

There’s also the fact that Microsoft is (perhaps by accident of fate) “building for the future”; a lot of Windows 11’s assumptions in particular make sense given hardware and CPU steppings in mind that should have shipped a year ago, but which are caught in the COVID logistical conga-line and so won’t be seen for another year. That includes e.g. Intel CPUs with ARM-like big/LITTLE designs.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#458

Post by godDLL »

greggman3 wrote: post #411

Define "Good GPU". What do you want to do with it?

Depends on whether a GPU is present. But yes, all the things.

Encoding video, modelling and rendering, compiling large code bases, sleeping for a week at least.

Good.

EDIT: Oh, your question was about the GPU, not the CPU, soz

Well, I don't care if it's part of the CPU SoC, in fact I prefer it to be. That's faster for memory access.

But it has to do all the things, as described above. If it is also not a nuisance, like downloading 120MB of driver-and-friends every time the wall clock bangs, then I'll be double happy with it. More than happy. Criminally and institutionally happy.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#459

Post by BozeWolf »

Underphil wrote: post #134
foobarbaz33 wrote: post #119

> if I'm missing on any new developments since 2015 Yes, you missed something huge. Apple Silicon M1 or nothing. It's just too good. Low power consumption allows the laptop to actually be used as a laptop. The power use-to-performance ratio is unmatched by anything on the market. Apple is breaking us free from decades of stagnation on the hardware front. Nothing else on the market comes close. I expect this to change…

Like so many people, I love the hardware but hate the software. Hoping that once Linux is solid on there, I'll be able to get one.

I was in the same boat around 2012. After 11 years of linux on the desktop and crappy student laptop, I needed a proper laptop for freelance jobs. Bought a macbook to put linux on. Ruined macos on day one. Reinstalled macos. Got used to it. Loved that all the hardware and software just works. Never installed ubuntu desktop again.

Would like to use linux again on the desktop, but macos is so nicely integrated with everything. The desktop experience is so much better than the gnome or kde version of the day. I code embedded c and web (python). Also do the occasional cad drawing and 3d printing. All this software just works on mac. Even corporate slack works okay, ms teams as well. Word, even! It sucks to be a linux desktop user or fanboy in professional environments. Not a mac fanboy, would switch if there was something better.

One drawback is that docker is just awfully slow compared to running it on native linux.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#460

Post by godDLL »

a3_nm wrote: post #307

Probably not what OP had in mind, but under the assumption that you want to buy a new laptop, one thing I would look for is low carbon footprint (many manufacturers publish this information), and low social impact in terms of the conditions in which the laptop is produced (still more difficult to have this information).

And how would you ascertain the veracity of said claim?
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